Recent reviews by Old Man Sou

For a whopping $17.76 you pay about $3.50 some odd cents per level. And yet somehow my main complaint about the game is that it only has one track and is pretty short for $17.76. Don't get me wrong though it's about everything you would expect out of an Alex Jones game. I'm still taking away points for the final level not being Israel.

Normally I would tell people that VNs are the worst kinds of entertainment. After playing New Gundam Breaker that thought is only reaffirmed. Dont be fooled, this game is a VN first and gundam game second. The best part of the game is setting up your abominable machine that has a Parkinsons Disease based targeting system. And I know this is a big personal gripe but everyone in this high school has Sameface Syndrome. Apart from some hair style changes and maybe one or two gradients of a difference with the slightly different colored eyes it's all the same face and it drives me crazy. For the $49.99 that was spent on this steaming pile Hindu Curry I could've had an amazing meal of Sweet-n-Sour Pork, Pork Fried Rice, An order of four pork baos, and still have enough change left over to get a Thai ice tea and a dozen dumplings for the road. I give it points for having a great deal of gundam parts to work with, but everything else surrounding the customization is just terrible. If I wanted to play a terrible game with amazing customization I'd go install APB Reloaded.

TL;DR Game Awful. I am vomit.

With Love and Cellulite, signed Chin Tu Fat.

When it comes to the bashing racers of the mid 2000s Burnout definitely won the race but Flatout won the Grand Prix. I loved the Burnout games and recently went and revisited the series. To the first one with classic arcade mechanics such as timed checkpoints and the like to the absolute craziness that Revenge was. I don't mind Burnout Paradise. However as a Burnout game it's incredibly hollow. Compare it to Flatout who have gone through quite a renaissance with Steam Deck verification and workshop support as well as getting support for modern resolutions. So how does Burnout Paradise feel hollow? Let me go down the line:

-After Touch Takedowns are gone in favor for Driveaway Wrecks

There are times where the After Touch was frustrating in Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge. But it had it's place. A shorter timer on the respawn would've made it less frustrating in the previous titles. However where you retain some control of your vehicle for an after touch takedown. With the Driveaway mechanic you basically have no control over your vehicle until the game feels like returning it to you. And often times it feels random what qualifies as a Driveaway wreck. I personally don't like the Driveaway mechanic. If you're going to take control of the vehicle away just tell me I wrecked so I can move on and not be held up on a barricade while the other racers go flying past wondering why I haven't reset yet until it's too late.

-Crash Junctions are gone

Introduced in Burnout 2 the Crash Junction became a mainstay of the Burnout games offering the player a scenario, a car, an absurd amount of boost, and a set amount of cars to crash with a target car. Why they removed Crash Junctions feels like the hallmark sign of cutting corners in the development process. I don't know whether it was a Criteron decision or a EA decision but the absence of the mode is very notable when you discover all the events across Paradise and notice that your only modes are Races, Stunt Run, Burning Laps, Marked Man, and Road Rage. Now there is something like the crash mode where you engage it and your car starts tumbling and you're awarded money for wrecking cars but it's nowhere near the same as a crash junction. The planning and strategy of it is just gone. You can basically traverse the whole damn map like this. The fact you're not even given a Crash Breaker to enjoy a massive explosion in the middle of a pile of cars just feels insulting as well as empty.

-Signature Takedowns are gone

This one feels like my own personal gripe about the game but the omission of Signature Takedowns really removed a lot of the flavor that the Burnout games had in my opinion. There was a great degree of satisfaction when you were coming along the section of a track where you could get a signature takedown and the wit that the names of the signature takedowns came with them. Gone Fishing, Serial Pillar, Crane In the Neck, Trailer Crash, Lumber Party. Just to throw out a handful of them from 3 & Revenge. The fact that you have so many spots for them in Paradise but yet they don't exist is just another reason why the game feels hollow.

-Cars

Burnout Paradise offers you 75 cars! Which feels like a lot until you get to unlocking them and realize there's about 30-ish cars and the rest are just alternate paint jobs for that car once you complete the burning lap for that vehicle. In Burnout 3 you've got 67 cars to unlock that actually feel somewhat unique from one another, Revenge gave you a whopping 79 to unlock. The number of cars feels nitpicky sure but it feels more like a regression than an improvement over the previous games. I'm fairly certain this was done to make people shell out for DLC but to speak candidly none of the DLC car packs ever really jumped out at me.

-Paradise City feels very small

At first I felt it to be pretty neat that Paradise had a finish line for all 8 corners of the compass. It's honestly a great detail on paper and pretty clever world building, in practice though it makes Paradise feel tiny compared to 3 & Revenge's World Tour modes. The variety in tracks to race down hurts sometimes because once you know the optimal route to each finish line it becomes trivial especially with how reluctant the AI is to even attempt to take a shortcut. They'll sometimes take a different route but I have not seen them attempt to even use the small shortcuts. This isn't helped by the fact that the whole game is basically you doing all the events over again minus the Burning Laps to upgrade your licence. I know that in 3 & Revenge's world tour they did reuse Tracks and Crash Junctions but the variety was aided by either it being a reverse or a different angle, traffic pattern for the crash event, or you would have to do the track with a different vehicle class entirely.

-Traffic Checks are worthless to attempt & do

When they introduced the traffic check in Revenge the cars would basically go flying when you would smack them from behind. This made a great way to maintain your boost and or knock out someone ever so slightly in front of you like a game of billiards. In Paradise performing a traffic check is just guaranteeing that you slow down enough for other cars to pass you no matter how big your vehicle is. I don't get this as the one touch of realism they decided to go with out of everything. It might be because of how abused the traffic check was in Revenge but that level of outrageous racing is what I play Burnout for. I may as well be playing 1, 2, or 3 if the Traffic Check has no value like it does here because I would vastly rather just wreck for rear ending a vehicle than for it to have no effect at all or for me to wreck anyway.


TL;DR
To summarize, Burnout Paradise isn't the worst way EA has killed an IP. They've definitely done a lot worse than this. (Looking at you Dead Space 3 & C&C 4) Burnout Paradise compared to the other entries is a good looking racer and isn't that bad to play. As a Burnout game though it's missing a lot of the things you would expect a Burnout game to have if you have played the previous installments and are expecting those things. Why a thumbs down? Mostly because if you wanna play this game online today you gotta rebuy it for 20 dollars and deal with the EA launcher. Sure Paradise will probably be the only version of Burnout that steam will have, and again. Not the most terrible racer out there. But I'll take Flatout 2 over Burnout Paradise any day of the week.

This game single handedly jump started my personal crusade against Buddy AI. No one, not a single soul, not even my worst enemy deserves to be subject to RE5 or any buddy AI whatsoever.

I've played kids games that insulted my intelligence less than this. Like with all David Cage you're greeted with the most hack fraud kind of writing and absolutely poor attempts to pull at your heart strings. The cherry on top is the game reprimanding you for your choices in the main menu. The saving throw of this is that you're eventually afforded the opportunity to shoot the same model of android at some point in the game. I wont lie that the game is pretty damn good looking, but that's about it has going for it. The only likable character in the whole game is only featured for about a third of it. The only other good character was killed off before I could kill him myself. Everyone else I just could not give a damn about no matter how hard the game tried. There are some entertaining nuggets of world lore I also enjoyed. Brazil, South Africa, and India all becoming world super powers is a great way to show how deep into fiction you really were. As if being in a clean Detroit wasn't enough of a clue.

This game is hardly worth a cup of coffee, you're better off farting into an empty cup and sniffing it and you get about the same experience. In the immortal words of Philosophy and Mathematics Professor Scott Steiner:

"YOU COME OUT HERE, AND TRYING TO GET THE SYMPY OF THE PEOPLE. BUT YOU DON'T GET MY SYMPY AT ALL"

The best girl in the series hands down is the Bakery Case. There is nothing in this series that looks better than the Bakery Case. Dont @ me because I only speak the truth. If you can't accept that Bakery Case is best girl your taste is trash and your sight is poor.

ROBO WANTS AN OREO

This is from a very outside perspective. I came into this knowing nothing about Azur Lane. And as I progressed through the game that has not change. Normally I make a lot of jokes at the expense of gacha players. But this ONE time. I will tell you that you're probably better off playing the gacha than this bland piece of boatware

You can only play this game ONCE. If you played it on the PS3 (Like I did) you have no reason to play it again. If you remember any shred of the ending the whole shebang just becomes stupid. Points for how dumb it is to fail the grocery store scene but other than that it's pretty forgettable. Cool tech demo for it's time though.

This game is a flawless representation of what its like to get popular on social media. Thanks to this game I was never a Twitter user. I once played this game a dog's age ago, then only recently came back to it to realize that the phrase "You are a sack of broken calcium" applies to so many of my former friends that I had no idea what this game was preparing me for until this moment. Call it a clouded moment within a bong rip. But when you play this game and realize what it's like when failure occurs you'll understand what I mean. The only thing that separates this game is from actually being a social media simulator is the fact that there is a game to played here, you don't have to scrub your identity if you fail. And best of all at some point fairly early in the game, It tells you to relax. It even has the courtesy to let you press esc if you're too relaxed.